"He dreams of the day when the spell of the bestseller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered." Enrique Vila-Matas

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Yehoshua’s Gift

Five Seasons by A. B. Yehoshua

A man has to be
in love.

A.B. Yehoshua

It was only on the train ride from Haifa back to Tel Aviv,
after I had found a seat and caught my breath, the ancient coastline flashing
by outside my window, that I opened up my copy of Five Seasons to see what the author A.B. Yehoshua had written
inside. Unfortunately the inscription was in Hebrew, a language with which I
have but a stumbling familiarity. Eager to know what he’d written, I asked an
Israeli soldier seated across the aisle from me—a frowzy-looking teenager with
an I-pod and Uzi—if he could translate the message, a request with which he
seemed happy to comply. “You met him?” he asked me, after a glance at the page.
He looked genuinely impressed. “Yes, just now, at a café in town.” He shook his
head and smiled. “My father says he’s the best.”

It had started on whim, before I was due to visit Israel
with my wife and sons, when I'd written the author at the university where he
teaches on the chance that he would meet with me for no other reason than that
I admired his work, indeed had been deeply changed in my thinking by his many prize-winning
novels about life in Israel today. As an American I was not alone in this. “When I
stumbled on the writing of A.B. Yehoshua,” writes Vivian Gornik in a recent article
in The Nation, “it was as though a
fault line had opened in a hardened surface to expose me to an emotional
insight that life on the Israeli street had denied me.” I’d experienced exactly
the same thing, some years earlier, before I’d actually been to Israel, when I’d
chanced upon a novel of his, A Late
Divorce, in a used bookshop in town. It was a revelation to me: for the
first time there were people—real, familiar, struggling people—behind the daily
newsprint drama of violence and fanaticism that had come to define the country
for me.

The Israelis of Yehoshua’s
novels are at once universal in their needs and fears and aspirations, and
complexly, compellingly distinct in their identity as Israelis, as Jews, a
mixture of toughness, pride, and despair, a political, emotional, plainly
existential dis-ease, that brings one so close to the brilliance and crisis of
modern Israel that one can only be moved. And what else is literature for than
to move us, to complicate our perspectives, to rattle the many truths and
generalizations we hold dear?

This is not to suggest that
Israel, as a nation, has simply been misunderstood, that the criticism of its
policies in recent decades is without foundation, based largely on
anti-Semitism and ignorance, only to state the obvious: that in a world fraught
with bigotry and strife, a world sick with religious and cultural narcissism, it
is fatal—literally fatal—to lose sight of the people themselves, be they Israelis
or Palestinians, to be satisfied with cutouts and caricatures, with shadows on
a screen. This is what good novelists do: they defy our complacency, our desire—all
but instinctive, it seems—to simplify the world, to paint it black and white. This
is Yehoshua’s gift: his ability to tell a story about a man, a woman, a family,
in such a way that we know them as people first,
with all their quirks and imperfections, and only after—if significantly—as
Israelis, as Jews.

His 1987 novel, Five Seasons (Molkho), my favorite of
all, is a case in point. Never anywhere have I read a more stirring, more
deeply human depiction of love and marriage and death, than in the pages of
this book. The novel is worth buying for the opening pages alone, an
exquisitely controlled description of one man’s lonely vigil at the deathbed of
his wife:

Molkho’s wife died at 4
a.m., and Molkho did his best to mark the moment forever, because he wished to
be able to remember it.And indeed,
thinking back on it even weeks and months later, he was convinced that he had
managed to refine the instant of her passing (her passing? he wasn’t sure the
word was right) into something clear and vivid containing not only thought and
feeling but also sound and light, such as the maroon glow of the small electric
heater, the greenish radiance of the numbers on the digital clock, the yellow
shaft of light from the bathroom that cast large shadows in the hallway, and
perhaps, too, the color of the sky, a pinkish ivory set off by the deep
obscurity around it.

What Five Seasons gives the
reader is a grave, sometimes funny, always acutely personal account of a
middle-aged man struggling to come to terms with his life after the protracted
and painful death of his wife, a simple story replete with love and longing, yet
further charged, further complicated, by the fact that it takes place in Israel,
a nation at war with itself, so that even its most quotidian details seem intimations
of some greater, more grievous truth. While never overtly political like his
novels Friendly Fire, A Woman In in Jerusalem, and The Liberated Bride, each of which I strongly
recommend, Five Seasons is to my mind
his most accomplished, most finely-wrought tale because it leaves me, not with
a nation and its politics—its settlers, terrorists, and soldiers—but with a
person, a human being, a vain and vulnerable man who longs for little more from
this life than love.

Avraham “Boolie” Yehoshuawas born in Palestine in 1936, a fifth-generation
Sephardic Jerusalemite.Following his
form al education at The Hebrew University, where he studied literature and
philosophy, Yehoshua moved to Paris for four years.In 1967 he returned to Israel and served as a
paratrooper during the Six Day War. Today he resides in Haifa, where he has
been a senior lecturer in literature at the University of Haifa since
1972.His works have been translated
into 28 languages and he is the recipient of the Bialik Prize, the Israel Prize
for Literature, and the Los angles Time Book Prize.He is credited with being among the first
Israeli writers to give voice to an Arab character in post-1948 Israeli
literature.*

George Ovitt and Peter Adam Nash

George Ovitt is the author of The Restoration of Perfection; The Snow Man, a collection of short stories, and Splitting the Difference, a collection of poems.
Peter Nash is the author of a recently completed novel called Parsimony, as well as of a biography on the life and times of the turn-of-the-century Jewish American sculptor, Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel. He can be reached at nashpeter@mac.com.